In a near future world where technology reigns supreme, Aedo, a female hacker, is released from prison. Aedo's crime was the public dissemination of reports coming from the government's energy department. This crime bought Aedo 18 months of imprisonment. Now, she is back in the Upcity, the area of the world under close surveillance by the state. Despite living in the Upcity, Aedo regularly communicates with inhabitants of the Undercity, the underworld of the surveillance state where crimes are more likely to go unnoticed, via a virtual hacker forum.

The same day as her discharge, Aedo is pulled back into a whistleblowing scheme by a government agent, Valencia Cadares. Cadares takes Aedo in, asking her to recover more documents from the same department. Cadares speculates that certain reports have been doctored; she wants Aedo to confirm her suspicions by logging into the agency database and retrieving the original documents. Unsure of whether to help or not, Aedo turns to her online hacker friends. Despite their advice, she still can't make up her mind.

When Cadares is arrested for attempting to access restricted data, Aedo finds she cannot walk away from the mission, no matter how earnestly she wants to live a more tranquil life post-prison. She uses Cadares's tablet to infiltrate the agency's headquarters and install a backdoor on the agent's computer, giving Aedo an access point towards the potentially revealing data. After installing the backdoor, Aedo is forced to flee the Upcity and descend into the Undercity, where she meets one of her fellow hackers, LogicalOR, in person. In the end, she makes the decision to join LogicalOR in the anarchist fight to make data democratic.